Ferndale man's remains to be returned to family 37 years after he was shot down in Vietnam

More than one year after his helicopter was shot down in Vietnam, a funeral was held for Ferndale's Sgt. Timothy John Jacobsen in 1972.

His family sat in the Ferndale cemetery as 21 gunshots were fired, a flag was presented to Jacobsen's mother and an empty casket was lowered into Jacobsen's grave. But, there was a twinge of hope with the grief -- the family didn't believe Jacobsen was dead as his body hadn't been found.

"When you're hanging onto hope, you'll cling onto anything," Jacobsen's sister Cindy McWhorter said. "Our whole family was very hopeful, and that went on for years and years."

After days, years and even decades passed, McWhorter explained that hope tended to shift in the family members, one by one, as they came to believe Jacobsen was likely dead. They only hoped his remains would return home to be placed in Ferndale, their rightful resting place, rather than being left on a hillside in Vietnam.

More than 37 years after Jacobsen's chopper went down, that hope is being realized. McWhorter said the family was notified earlier this month by a representative of the United States Army that Jacobsen's remains had been found, identified and would be returned to the family.

"It was a shock," said another of Jacobsen's sisters, Renee Jacobsen, of the news. "I wanted to crawl into a hole. I couldn't call anyone -- couldn't talk to anyone. I just wanted to scream it out, but I couldn't."

A call to war

Tim Jacobsen was born one of eight children to Margie and Kermit Jacobsen. The family lived on one of Ferndale's dairy ranches until 1964, when the flood washed them out.

After relocating to Petrolia, Kermit Jacobsen started a cattle ranch and the children, especially Tim and his brother Skip, spent all their free time working. But, that's not to say Tim Jacobsen didn't have time for other pursuits. According to his sisters, he was the county's top rated bull rider by 1968, always wearing a trademark satin shirt at rodeos. He also had a mischievous streak.

"We were always up to something and he was always in the middle of it," McWhorter said.

Things took on a somber note for the family in 1967, when Skip Jacobsen was drafted to go to war.

"At dinner time we always had the television on, and every night they gave the statistics of how many boys were killed and how many were missing," McWhorter said. "Sometimes, our dad would just get up and turn it off."

The sisters said the family lived for the mail, always waiting anxiously for the next word from Skip.

Soon, the sisters got their brother back.

"It was a huge relief when he came home," Renee Jacobsen said. "It was a huge celebration."

But it would be a short-lived one, as Tim Jacobsen was drafted shortly after Skip's return.

The family then lived through his letters, too. He would write to tell his parents of the friends he made, the things he missed and how much he looked forward to seeing them. His older siblings got much different letters, detailing the danger he was in, the fear he felt and the realities of war.

Then, on May 16, 1971, the Jacobsen family watched its world crumble when a group of Army officers came to its Petrolia home and told Kermit Jacobsen his son's helicopter had been shot down the day before. His son's condition and whereabouts were unknown, the officers told him.

"Mom came home to find dad just sitting on the porch," McWhorter said, her voice trailing off.

"It doesn't matter how many times you tell it," she continued after a moment. "It's 37 years later, and it still feels like yesterday."

May 16, 1971

Sgt. Tim Jacobsen was a doorgunner with the 101st Airborne when his helicopter tried to touch down in a landing zone, but started to take heavy enemy fire that wounded a crew member.

"They never actually landed, but diverted to transport the wounded crew member to get medical attention," Major Bob Clewell, the mission's commanding officer, wrote in an online memorial for the lost soldiers. "It was said that the aircraft remained at a relative low level, lost power, then crashed in steep hostile wooded terrain, apparently either with flames and/or badly scattered. No evident chance for survivors."

Clewell went on to write that a friendly Vietnamese unit went to the crash sight several weeks later, but found no survivors and did not recover any of the American dead.

None of this was known to the Jacobsen family at the time. All they knew was Tim Jacobsen's helicopter had gone down and his body hadn't been found.

Exactly one year and one day after the crash, the Army declared Tim Jacobsen dead, but the family held out hope, even through the funeral.

"We'd talk about him just to keep him alive inside of us," Renee Jacobsen said. "There was just such a hole -- just emptiness."

It wasn't until decades later that McWhorter said she started taking a closer look into what happened to her brother. She poured through the Army reports sent to her mother, contacted members of his division and soon began to realize Tim Jacobsen was likely dead. Her focus then began to change -- she just wanted to see him laid to rest at home.

"That would be the next best thing -- for him to be repatriated," she said.

One of many

According to the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, Tim Jacobsen was one of more than 1,350 U.S. soldiers still unidentified and unrecovered in Vietnam. More than 600 have been identified and repatriated.

Bill Duker, director of Vietnam Veterans of America's Veterans Initiative Program, knows more than most what it took to get those 600 veterans' remains home, as he works diligently to make sure the remains of Vietnam soldiers are recovered and identified.

Duker's program seeks out U.S. Vietnam War veterans to take their eyewitness accounts of the war, which it then cross references with military reports to compile as much information about the location of graves, crash sites and fallen soldiers as possible. Once a year, the program then goes and turns all that information over to the Vietnamese.

"We encourage our counterparts, our former enemies -- the Vietnamese veterans -- to provide information, either archival or more importantly eyewitness accounts, that could lead Americans to the remains of unaccounted for soldiers," Duker said. "Over 15 years, we've been very successful."

Duker wouldn't divulge how many recoveries this information has led to, saying the numbers game was too eerily similar to the body counts of the war for his taste, and that his program is just one arm of a very collaborative effort. Duker did say, however, that his program has tried to work diligently to make sure as many of the 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers still missing are found and identified.

"As far as we know, there's nothing like this program anywhere in the past or the present, where former enemies actually sit down across from each other and share information and develop mutual information and try to figure out what happened to those who didn't come home from the war," Duker said.

Those efforts have been greatly aided by advances in DNA evidence. Duker said the Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command -- better known as JPAC -- has a laboratory where remains are taken for testing. It used to be dental records were just about the only way to come up with a positive match on remains, but that has all changed.

DNA evidence allows the JPAC lab to cross reference a sample taken from a recovered bone with blood samples from relatives of missing soldiers.

But, time is proving a formidable enemy in excavating remains, Duker said.

"Witnesses are getting old, and some are passing away," Duker said. "The topography of the land is changing. Landmarks that were important in 1970 -- a lot of them are no longer there."

A super acidic soil also creates complications, as it quickly degrades remains to the point they are hardly recognizable, Duker said.

Still, Duker said what has been accomplished is pretty remarkable.

"It's a real needle in the haystack kind of thing, but it's amazing how many remains have been recovered," Duker said, adding that his program's mission will continue. "Our feeling is, and always has been, that families deserve to know what happened to their loved ones in the war and have a proper burial for them. It doesn't matter what side of the war you fought on."

Memorial Day

When Skip Jacobsen was asked to give a blood sample to the Army several years ago, the family didn't think much of it. But, after hearing Tim Jacobsen's remains have been identified, McWhorter thinks it just might be because of the DNA link.

McWhorter said the family is waiting to get an official call from the Army, which will then send some officers to meet the family and present it with Tim Jacobsen's remains and provide them with more details as to how his remains were found and identified.

She said the Army has offered a full military funeral in Arlington National Cemetery. Though she said the family will take a vote on the matter, McWhorter said she would personally rather see her brother laid to rest in Ferndale, where he has four generations of history on both sides of his family.

Monday, Ferndale will hold its annual Memorial Day Parade, reportedly one of the oldest in the country, and Tim Jacobsen will be welcomed home by the town he left more than 37 years ago.

McWhorter said a banner will be draped over Veterans Hall, reading "Welcome Home Tim Jacobsen," and an Iraq veteran will give a speech commemorating the helicopter gunner and acclaimed bull rider who was one of three Ferndale men to be killed in Vietnam.

While McWhorter said the recent developments in her brother's case do not provide closure -- something she doesn't ever think she will have -- she said they do provide answers, which is what drew her to those Army reports mailed to her mother years ago.

"What drove me to search is I wanted answers to questions I had," she said. "Now, I feel like the search is over. My brother is coming home."